which there should "no knight winne worship but if hee be of worship himselfe, and of good living, and that loveth God, and dreadeth God,"-that Lancelot found how foul and how radical was his great sinfulness. Then at last he found that he had been "more hardy then is the stone, and more bitter then is the wood, and more naked and bare then is the leefe of the fig-tree." Then was he forced to make remorseful confession that "hee had loved a queene unmeasurably many yeares, and all the great deeds of armes that I have done, I did the most part for the queenes sake, and for her sake would I doe battaile, were it right or wrong, and never did I battaile all onely for God's sake, but for to winne worship and to cause mee to bee the better beloved, and little or nought I thanked God of it."" It was this very pride of his, using, as it did, "wrong warres with vaine-glory, more for the pleasure of the world than to please" God,-that lay behind his open crime and led him the more readily into it. For, long before, a "damosell" had had the boldness and good sense to say to him "one thing me thinketh that ye lacke, ye that are a knight wiveless, that ye will not love some maiden or gentlewoman ;" and Lancelot had replied-" to bee a wedded man I thinke never to be, for if I were, then should I be bound to tarry with my wife and leave armes, and turnaments, battells and adventures." It had been well for him if he had listened to this good advice and followed it, and had chosen to be good rather than famous: it was his duty, too, for, as he said himself, "I might have been married and I had would, but I never applyed mee to be married." It was not wholly his misfortune that he did not love the maid of Astolat, for instance, but it was, in part, his sin. There are few passages in all the Idyls of higher truth, of nobler thought, and of more touching beauty than those verses in which Arthur kindly and most wisely shows to Lancelot his error:

VOL. XVIII.

"answered Lancelot, 'Fair she was, my king, Pure as ye ever wish your knights to be.

To doubt her fairness were to want an eye,

To doubt her purenesss were to want a heart,
Yea, to be loved, if what is worthy love
Could bind him, but free love will not be bound.'

3

'Free love, so bound, were freest,' said the king.
'Let love be free; free love is for the best:
And after heaven, on our dull side of death,
What should be best, if not so pure a love
Clothed in so pure a loveliness? yet thee
She failed to bind, though being, as I think,
Unbound as yet, and gentle as I know.'"

It was not his misfortune that he sacrificed the joy of pure and wedded love to his exultant love of honor, and that so he fell into his shameless love of Guinevere. It was his sin, as, afterwards, he sorrowfully saw. His story is to us the story of a proud and godless love of glory, leading at last to infamy and wretchedness.

During the quest of the Sanc Greal, it seemed, indeed, that he had "left pride and taken him unto humilitie." And yet, again and again, did it become needful that he should receive warning and rebuke for his "evil faith and poore beleeve, the which," as was once told him, "will make thee to fall into the deepe pit of hell, if thou keepe thee not." "Hee hath taken upon him," said a goodly hermit, "to forsake sinne; and were not that hee is unstable, but by his thought he is like to turn againe, he should be next to achieve the Sanc Greal. But God knoweth well his thought and his unstableness." And so, although at last he came nigh unto the Sanc Greal, and saw the great glory and "clearnesse" which shone round about it, and heard the melody of a voice "which sung so sweetly that it seemed no earthly thing, and him thought that the voice said 'joy and honor be to the Father of heaven,'"-yet he could not approach to it, nor be fed with it, but was smitten down as by a blast of fire, so that he lay as dead for many days. And when the quest was over, and he had come again to the round table, he "forgat the promise and profession that he made in the quest," and went back again to all his sinful love. This was the state of things when the fair maid Elaine "cast such a love unto Sir Launcelot,"-a love of which he was unworthy, a love which in his blindness and his willfulness he cast aside, but a love which took great vengeance on him afterward when, all remorsefully, he gazed upon that funeral barge that floated down from Astolat, and knew that there was

lying one who loved him with a purity and strength and simple truth which Guinevere could never show to him, and which he could not ever know again.

Such is, in part, the history of Lancelot, and such his character, a character of wonderful interest and drawn with great force and spirit. There is a splendor and a nobility about it which make it strangely fascinating, and which, as it seems to us, showing as they do how magnificently good he might have been, make the great blackness of the sin which he committed the more hideous and hateful. It sometimes happens that we find, among military men particularly, instances of character in which the noblest force and courage are combined with great simplicity, and with exquisite tenderness and delicacy of sensibility. Not to mention some real instances in history, which will readily occur to the memory of our readers, the character of Colonel Newcome, in recent English fiction, is such an one. And we hazard little in saying that in all our modern fictitious literature there are few characters so beautiful and so irresistibly fascinating. Somewhat the same elements of grandeur and of beauty are found in the Lancelot of Sir Thomas Malory's romances and of Mr. Tennyson's poems. Of such a man we should have the right to expect that if he ever was a penitent, his sorrow would be very deep and bitter, and his humility most genuine. So was it, in fact, with Lancelot. For nearly seven years he did great penance for his sins, and suffered such remorse as could not be relieved by any "comfort that the bishop, nor Sir Bors, nor none of all his fellowes could make him." And when at last he died, there was a wondrous joy of angels over him, as "over one sinner that repenteth," for he had become as had been prophesied “a full holy man." He outlived both the king and queen; but after the death of Guinevere he lingered in much pain and weariness of body and of soul, not mourning for the loss of his old "rejoyceing of sinne," but piously repenting of his own "presumption and pride," and of his great ingratitude to God and to his king. And finally, one day his comrades found his "carefull body" lying lifeless on his bed, and noticed that "hee lay as hee had smiled."

The subject of the fourth Idyl is the discovery of this guilty love of Lancelot and Guinevere,-the awful remorse and penitence of the queen, and the sublime and mighty sorrow of the king. Here, again, Mr. Tennyson has simplified and condensed the story so that it becomes more manageable for poetry, and perhaps more impressive in its power. We have not space to dwell upon it. We cannot more than mention the exquisite skill with which the incidents of the sad story are arranged, and the scenery of it managed. Nowhere else in the volume is the poetry so passionate, and so sublime as here. Nowhere else in all that Mr. Tennyson has written is there such life, such fire, as lives and burns in the description of the interview of Arthur with his queen. The tone of the preceding Idyls is comparatively quiet, if we except some parts of "Vivien :" but here is the expression of a passionate emotion far more intense than any words can utter, but which, by some mysterious power, is made to live even in the very sound and rythm of the verse, and to excite in those who read it a wonderfully sorrowful and pitying sympathy. We cannot forbear to call attention to the power with which the character of Arthur,-which until now was somewhat hidden in the background of the other stories, though we have caught continual glimpses of its majesty,—is made to blaze forth suddenly with such a glory and a beauty that it fairly startles one. In a somewhat similar way, the queen, who until now has seemed to be little more than a jealous, sullen, passionate beauty, is made by her repentance to be full of most attractive loveliness. Equally noteworthy and singularly true is the distinction which the poet makes between the queen's remorse and her sincere repentance. For when she left the court, and, to the holy house at Almesbury,

"Fled all night long by glimmering waste and weald,
And heard the spirits of the waste and weald,
Moan as she fled, or thought she heard them moan:
And in herself she moaned, 'Too late, too late,"

even then, in her despair, she felt a bitter shame, and was all wrapt in black remorse. How men would scorn her,-how

disgraced she was,-how bitterly the realm, on which her sin had brought

"Red ruin and the breaking up of laws,"

would hate her, and how all her love of Lancelot was at an end forever, these were the thoughts that filled her mind and crushed her down in tearless and in hopeless misery. But not yet was she penitent. Not even when she tried, a little afterward, to stifle her remorse and calm her conscience by the thought that she had put upon herself the penance not

"in thought

Not ev❜n in inmost thought to think again

The sins that made the past so pleasant to us :

And I have sworn never to see him more,

To see him more,”—

not even then did she repent, for still she loved him with a guilty love no self-inflicted penance could atone for: and, even in that very act of penance, all her memory went back, in guilty longings and regrets, to those same passionate days which now were come to such a bitter ending. But when the King had come to Almesbury, and found her there in her remorse and shame, and showed her all her sin and all the woe and ruin she had caused, and yet forbore to cast against her the reproaches which she well deserved, and curse her with the curse which she had brought on others; when, with a soul all filled with manly sorrow and with pitying love, he gave to her his full and free forgiveness, harder to be borne than any scorn or curse; when he spake to her of true repentance, and of a hope that yet might be fulfilled when this unstable world had passed away; and when, although he loved her still, he would not bring her forth again to fill the throne she had disgraced, but left her with a pure and tender and most passionate and last farewell, and with a silent blessing, then the queen repented. Then, at last, she saw the loveliness of purity and goodness: then her mind and soul were changed, and she loved Lancelot no longer, but clave with all her being unto Arthur. This was something different from penance, and sublimer than remorse. There was hope in it, and faith. Her